The 82nd Venice Film Festival may have featured its usual glamour, with stars like Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett, Jude Law and George Clooney arriving by water taxi, but the films on show struck a markedly political tone. Jury president Alexander Payne initially deflected questions on current affairs, yet the festival's lineup proved deeply engaged with real-world crises.
Two of the festival's biggest hits were directed by women and tackled harrowing contemporary issues. Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab dramatises the killing of a five-year-old girl in Gaza by Israeli forces, using real audio of the child's desperate phone call to emergency services. The film earned a 23-minute standing ovation and chants of 'Free Palestine'. Ben Hania said she made the film to avoid complicity: 'All I have is this one tool that I have mastered a little bit – cinema.'
Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite, her first film in eight years, depicts the 18-minute countdown from a nuclear strike on the US to impact, from multiple perspectives. Bigelow described it as an invitation to debate nuclear disarmament, asking: 'How is annihilating the world a good defensive measure?'
Other films addressed climate inaction, employment insecurity, AI ethics and Vladimir Putin's rise to power. Yorgos Lanthimos's Bugonia, starring Emma Stone, is an allegory for climate catastrophe, with Lanthimos warning: 'Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon.' Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice satirises job insecurity in modern capitalism, while Olivier Assayas's The Wizard of the Kremlin, with Jude Law as Putin, explores the origins of 21st-century politics.
The trend for political engagement extended beyond Venice. The San Sebastián film festival director issued a statement condemning the 'genocide' in Gaza, and in London, actor Hugh Bonneville used a red carpet appearance to denounce actions in Gaza City as 'indefensible'.
